Location: BSECS 2020, St Hugh’s College, Oxford University

Recent work on this play – a companion to Centlivre’s The Gamester (1705) – has explored its critique of gambling, its representation of female agency, and its engagement with natural philosophy. My approach is a different: I propose to take the common eighteenth-century parallel between the stage and the card-table as a point of departure for understanding both the structuring of Centlivre’s plot and the dynamics of her individual scenes. I begin by presenting the game of Basset, and – using some recent theory on modern cardgames in tandem with theories of performance – identify the specific rhythm of the game. I then show that this rhythm is present in Centlivre’s play, and suggest how such rhythms support existing work on the stage of the 1700s as a sociable space of dramatic collusion rather than theatrical illusion.